A small selection of my work is now available as designs on mugs through the Society 6 website. These are the first four designs of the ones available. The larger (and more beautifully shaped) mugs retail for the equivalent of 13 euros - quite cheap considering it's a unique design and made and shipped in small (very small in my case!) numbers. The items usually ship in three days - and yes they do ship to Malta (and everywhere else) of course. Apart from the quirky mugs there's also a representative selection of my work available as art prints on gallery quality paper or stretched canvas. You can also return items if you don't like them for any reason.

The latest piece I'm working on takes its cue from Antoine de Favray's fabulous but incredibly pompous portrait of Grand Master Pinto which hangs at St. John's in Valletta.

Favray probably set out to adhere to the unwritten rules of the standard commissioned work - that is to portray the Grand Master in all his worldly glory and surrounded by a plethora of symbols of grandeur: crown, shield, sword, drapery..you name it and it's all crammed in Favray's portrait.

But I tend to see this portrait more with the eyes of Goya when he set out to paint the Spanish royal family. Goya probably did not intend to caricature the family of Charles IV when he executed that particular painting but the unflattering depictions surely approach caricature...

Pinto died in 1773 and twenty five years later the Knights of St.John were unceremoniously bundled out of Malta by the cunning Napoleon Bonaparte.

On the right is Favray's portrait for comparison - and yes I am fully aware that comparisons are odious....

I am in no way attempting a lookalike or trying to add all the paraphernalia in the original work. I tend to cut down on the fireworks and keep to the straight and narrow road. My aim is pure and innocent mockery....

The frivolity of Man has no limits and I reckon this great painting (unintentionally?) brings that out completely.

Starting out with some rather tedious coloring in ...I love taking pictures of my left hand

Cautious start on the Grand Master's face

The face completed...

Finally the image is completed two months after starting out. Altogether I used about nine colors out of the possible range of eleven colored inks I have, combining three or four colors for the curtains and carmine and black for the cape.

For the face I also combined colors: sepia, burnt sienna, yellow and a hint of vermilion.

I am now ready to start on something else...whatever and whenever that will be.

Ironic really. I have written about several subjects but I have never featured any of my early cartoon work here. As I said in one of my first blog posts, I made a conscious decision to try my hand at cartooning after visiting Ralph Steadman's Between the Eyes exhibition in London's South Bank Centre in 1984.

Most of the sketches here date from that fateful year to 1989. Most of them started as pencil doodles until eventually a few lines indicate the features a face might take. A few of these early drawings served as preparatory sketches when I eventually started to do more "finished" works, some others were never utilised. The medium is ink and sometimes a few strokes of colored pencils were added.

It has been more than a month now that I have worked on this new drawing and I still think I am far from completing this particular picture. It has proved a lot more challenging than I thought it would be. I am deciding on additions – and general composition - bit by bit as I go along. I have now come to the stage where I have the basic saintly figure and the accompanying cat and dog (is there a place for a bird somewhere?) and I have framed the trio between two pairs of columns and added an arch. The whole thing still looks like it is less than half completed.I thought it best to take a photo of the work done so far and decide on the way forward by manipulating in a couple of scenarios. I do not believe this is cheating…it is just a more efficient way to test and visualize how the end work could eventually look. The inspirations behind this picture are many. First Saint Francis himself, a wealthy, worldly man who turned his back on all things material and decided to embrace poverty. A shining example through the ages, perhaps more so in the modern, consumerist, must-have-now world we live in today.

Then there is something of the miniature holy pictures from my childhood (santi in Maltese) which I think always had some effect on most children of the sixties growing up in what was then (on the face of it at least) a devoutly Catholic country. These were probably among the foremost visual images then – along with collectible cards featuring animals, soldiers’ historical uniforms, and of course dinosaurs. There is also the medieval angle to the composition. I simply love Proto Renaissance paintings…the stiff figures and poses…the gold everywhere…the unlikely landscapes…the architectural motifs… the heavy Byzantine influences… Think Duccio di Bouninsegna, think Giotto, think Fra Angelico - you get the picture (Comparisons are odious I know, in this case they border on the outrageous). To this day these paintings are among the foremost I look for in any major art museum I visit. I will not necessarily adhere slavishly to the landscape, columns and motifs I have added digitally to help me map the way forward but they will certainly help. I reckon this picture will take a few more weeks to complete.

This is actually only the second time I am attempting a drawing on a quasi-religious theme and using Christian iconography. I had previously completed "Visitation" in 1995. (image on left) showing an anonymous saintly nun being visited by an unabashedly unclothed angel delivering a rose. I remember that the rendering of the massive archway was murder but the nun was a joy to draw - a wobbly curvy shape with an equally oval face.This remains a favorite work of mine (even if I say so) and I like the subtle humour of the work.There are obviously parallels between the drawing I am doing now and this one.

The God of Small Mercies smiled down on me today after a very trying day yesterday. My workhorse pc died on me and that immediately threw me in a funk. Took it for repairs with heart in mouth... Nothing much wrong with it - just the hard disk f***d up but thankfully all of the stuff on it was recoverable. I do back ups on an external drive and in case of emergencies I can sort of work on my netbook but in reality working on graphics on a netbook screen is like trying out a Ferrari in the narrow streets of my village.

I took the photo below last Sunday while walking in Lija. It was such a picture perfect window sill that I decided to muck it up a bit...